Willkommen nach Deutschland

A short blog while camping out on the carpeted floor in the Frankfurt airport. On Monday Marah and I flew on a United flight SFO-JFK, slept a bit at her parents, had a quick lunch and then headed out for our Lufthansa EWR-FRA flight.

The flight to New York was really productive for me - plugged my laptop in and threw together a first draft of my slides for my talk in Tokyo later this month, and caught up on a bunch of email and reading. And at the risk of sounding like a total snob, it finally answered my age-old question: "Is there really a difference between flying First Class and Business Class on the United p.s. flights?" In short, no. The seats are a little bit better -- they're the same as the Singapore Airlines SpaceBed seats. The food was almost the same as what Marah was served in Business, and the new "Charlie Trotter" menus aren't very good. OK, enough travel snobbery for now. Well, almost. The 747 flight to Frankfurt was pretty much the usual...though we were seated at the nose of the plane, and while it's generally pretty quiet up there, Marah almost jumped at the loud sound of the landing gear retracting after takeoff.

OK, off to shower and spend the day in Frankfurt. Looks like it will be a dreary day here.